CLASHING COLOURS
The Yes23 campaign appears to have scrubbed the colour purple from its merchandise, Sky News Australia reports, after the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) contacted it about looking too similar. Posters, badges and bumper stickers have reportedly disappeared from Yes23’s online shop, which comes just one day after the AEC asked the Yes23 campaign to move its purple signs a bit farther from polling booths so it didn’t mislead voters. The AEC doesn’t have an official stance on the referendum. Meanwhile The Australian’s ($) Paul Kelly has repeated the myth that the Voice will be a fourth arm of government, even though this has been proved “first-rate nonsense” by AAP FactCheck. Kelly writes that “claims that Parliament can control the scope of the Voice are wrong” and in the next sentence admits it can “determine the Voice’s composition, size and operations”. What exactly does Kelly, a former editor-in-chief of the paper, think determines scope?
A world away, The Australian’s ($) Paige Taylor reports pro-No Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price has vowed to scrutinise Indigenous spending… even though “the Voice proposal was partly conceived as a way to end decades of waste and misdirected funds”, Taylor adds pointedly. The reporter continues that, of the $40 billion some claim is spent on Indigenous peoples annually, $27.4 billion or so is actually “for things all Australians receive, such as Medicare”. Must be lonely at that Murdoch paper. Indigenous Australians Minister Linda Burney said she’d already made changes in June from an audit, The Age ($) reports, and pointed out the Coalition was asking for a probe of its own spending during its decade-long reign.
GIVING THE GAME AWAY
The Andrews government hired lawyers from Arnold Bloch Leibler at a cost of $1.27 million to cancel the 2026 Commonwealth Games three weeks before the public was told, The Age ($) reports. And Department of Premier and Cabinet secretary Jeremi Moule went to London to inform UK Games of the move two days before cabinet signed off on the decision, the paper adds, which also meant it had just eight hours’ notice of the cancellation before the government announced it. Premier Jacinta Allan was the minister responsible for delivering the Games, the paper notes. More headaches for Allan — Victorian Treasurer Tim Pallas swears the leader knew about his plan to announce a new property tax on all vacant residential land while at a Property Council breakfast… even though Assistant Treasurer Danny Pearson told reporters he didn’t know about it, The Australian ($) reports.
Meanwhile in Queensland, the former deputy premier Jackie Trad, who quit in 2020, has succeeded in keeping a corruption watchdog report about her out of the public eye. She works for law firm Slater and Gordon now, the Brisbane Times ($) reports, and says the Crime and Corruption Commission’s case against her damaged her career and family — it was looking into allegations she interfered in the recruitment process of a senior Treasury official. Did it find anything? I guess we’ll never know. Speaking of the unknown — the ABF says the Christmas Island detention centre is finally empty after the last 37 detainees arrived in Australia, Guardian Australia reports. But for reasons unclear, it won’t close, despite the UN calling for it.
NO, PLANE AND SIMPLE
Transport Minister Catherine King is refusing to face an inquiry into her decision to block more Qatar flights, calling the whole thing a “political stunt” by the opposition. Guardian Australia notes the probe came after “outcry from the aviation and tourism sectors”, with questions swirling about Qantas leaning on the government. MPs never appear before Senate committees, King argued, just ask Opposition leader Peter Dutton who has refused to face them a bunch of times (you may remember he didn’t appear before the inquiry into his au pair affair, as The Conversation reported in 2018). But Senator Simon Birmingham called King’s reluctance “the height of evasiveness”, saying her claiming public interest immunity on the details of her refusal was bad enough.
Meanwhile the SMH ($) reports former ABC presenter Emma Alberici agreed a former detective she interviewed in 2015 was “hung out to dry” after the cop criticised both the family of a victim of a gay hate crime and the police minister at the time, then promptly left the force. Alberici told the Special Commission of Inquiry into LGBTIQ Hate Crimes that Pamela Young’s superior, then-NSW Police deputy commissioner Mick Willing, knew about the interview because the journalist spoke to him about it, while Young’s fellow cop told the inquiry Willing was on speakerphone on the way to ABC. He claimed he had no idea. Scott Johnson fell to his death from a Manly cliff in 1988 in a presumed suicide — his killer was jailed this year. And finally, 91% of the allegations made against Queensland cops last year for “assault or excessive use of force” went unpunished, Guardian Australia reports — by the numbers, of 619 allegations, just 44 were deemed bad enough that they needed action, and 40 were dealt with via local “management resolution”, which usually involves a conversation with a manager. On occasion training or rehab too, the paper adds.
ON A LIGHTER NOTE
A Cootamundra cab driver was aimlessly driving around the regional NSW town about lunchtime when his phone rang with the job of his lifetime. There are a couple of women waiting for a train that isn’t going to arrive, the person on the other end said. They’re about 30 minutes up the road in Harden — you free? Any misgivings the cabbie may have had about driving 40km for a fare were mollified when he heard their destination — Melbourne. As in Melbourne in the next state over, some six hours and 580km south. Sure, he figured, doing some quick calculations in his head. When he pulled up at the train station, two people clambered into the back of his cab — including Guardian Australia’s Gabrielle Chan. The train had come 30 minutes earlier than scheduled due to an error, she explained, and an apologetic NSW TrainLink staffer had called her to suggest alternative transport.
What about a train to Sydney, he had suggested brightly down the phone, and then a plane from Sydney to Melbourne? Chan doubted she’d make the last flight. After a couple of other suggestions, he asked an innocuous question. Does Harden have a taxi? It has 2,000 residents and one school, one might’ve countered, what do you think? Queue the Coota cabbie. He chatted happily to the women about life in NSW’s rural heartland, about their jobs, and their destinations. One said goodbye at the NSW border, but Chan was dropped in the city of Melbourne a mere hour after her train would’ve arrived. The meter clicked off — as she bid her cabbie-saviour adieu, she noticed it read precisely $2,096.32, to be picked up by TrainLink (she swears to taxpayers everywhere that there was only one toilet break). As for her train home from Melbourne, Chan made sure to turn up a full hour early. Fare’s fair, and all that.
Hoping you get where you need to go today, one way or another.
SAY WHAT?
Of course YOUR vote is totally up to you but don’t get sucked in by all the bullshit scare campaigns. If you don’t know, find out.
Peter Garrett
The frontman of Australian rock band Midnight Oil has told Australians “don’t let anyone treat you like a mug”, saying there’s not a scrap of truth to claims the Voice would let unknown people take away land or your home: “Let’s deal with the facts here.”
CRIKEY RECAP
“Our people are strong and resilient, and when we are free to choose our own path, the whole country benefits. We’ve seen this in Victoria, where because of Aunty Tanya Day’s family, we’ve abolished the criminalisation of public drunkenness; and because of Aunty Veronica Nelson’s family and the Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service, we’ve changed the bail laws.
“A representative body is a small step along the way, a mechanism for us to demand policy changes. This isn’t a means of justice, or land back, it’s a representative body. Ultimately, I believe that when a clear majority of Australians vote Yes in the referendum, it will send a strong message that we want justice, equity and enduring change.”
“The only real No camp response to that is to argue that too much money is spent on First Peoples now, by wildly exaggerating the amounts spent. Or, in Peter Dutton’s case, to argue that a legislated Voice to Parliament would do the same things as a constitutional Voice.
“But Dutton’s embrace of both a legislated Voice and the idea of a second referendum has isolated him from the rest of the No campaign — indeed, even from his own Indigenous Affairs Minister Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, who holds that First Peoples should simply be assimilated and there is no need for any separate Indigenous programs or even an Indigenous Affairs portfolio.”
“This year the AEC decided not to embed Aboriginal interpreters into remote voter service teams — as it had done in previous years — and instead opted for day-of onboarding of interpreters in community. Bloom told Crikey and ICTV that these on-the-spot hires — formally called ‘local assistants’ — could turn up to the polling booth on the day and say: ‘I’d like to work.’
“Training would take 15 minutes, there’d be a few ‘streamlined’ forms to fill in (bank details, tax file number — ‘The sort of information that we will need to be able to pay them,’ Bloom said), and then they’d be on the AEC books and ready to work.”
READ ALL ABOUT IT
Armenia to join International Criminal Court; ‘wrong’ decision, says Russia (Al Jazeera)
‘He came with a burning torch’: Threats force 1 in 4 Dutch politicians to seek protection (euronews)
Republican Matt Gaetz files historic bid to oust Speaker Kevin McCarthy (BBC)
‘They’re just meat’: Russia deploys punishment battalions in echo of Stalin (Reuters)
Trudeau says he’s ‘not looking to escalate’ tensions as India tells 41 Canadian diplomats to leave (CBC)
Hospitalisation of Iranian girl leads to claims against ‘morality police’ (The Guardian)
THE COMMENTARIAT
How might the First Nations Voice to Parliament referendum affect Australia’s international reputation? — Rebecca Strating, Andrea Carson, Simon Jackman (The Conversation): “Most news and social media mentions of the Voice were generated in ‘Anglosphere’ countries, such as the United States, United Kingdom and Canada. Meltwater data had the US well out in front with more than 63,000 mentions of the Voice in the past three months, with the UK second at just over 16,000. New Zealand is also following the debate, with more than 2,000 mentions, as well as politicians in the Pacific. Launches and rallies in support of the Yes campaign have also been held in the US and UK, receiving online attention … But the Meltwater data is restricted to English, and can only reveal so much about how much attention people in other countries are paying to the Voice referendum.
“And while there are public reports on Australian attitudes to other countries, there is much less research on how people in other countries think about Australians. Previous research by Professor Simon Jackman shows a general sense of ambivalence towards Australia’s national character among people in Japan, South Korea, China, Indonesia and the US. The lack of research on Australia’s reputation in other countries will make it difficult to assess the impact of the Voice result. What does seem likely, however, is that a No result will be weaponised by other countries against Australia. While the Global Times, a leading Chinese English-language news outlet, has been relatively quiet on the Voice so far, it has a history of using strategic narratives to blunt criticisms of China’s human rights record.”
Steady Bullock pauses for now, but November could be crunch time — John Kehoe (The AFR) ($): “Amid a surge in government bond yields and the international oil price, new Reserve Bank of Australia governor Michele Bullock is staying calm for now. Bullock is sticking with predecessor Philip Lowe’s script that the central bank is determined to reduce inflation to within the 2-3% target range in a ‘reasonable timeframe’, or by late 2025. In her first time chairing the RBA board meeting, the steady Bullock was never going to shock financial markets and households by shifting much from Lowe’s monetary policy stance and closely watched words.
“She was his deputy for 18 months at the RBA board table and most of the nine-member board was there too for the Lowe era. Bullock is very much a believer in balancing reducing inflation with preserving as many jobs as possible and minimising the anticipated rise in unemployment. Indeed, it’s partly why Treasurer Jim Chalmers chose her for this delicate rate-tightening cycle. For now, it’s a change of leadership without any change in monetary policy. The main adjustment in the statement on Tuesday was the addition of “fuel prices have risen notably of late”, after petrol prices marched above $2 a litre. Bullock removed an outdated reference that inflation in July declined to 4.9%. Apart from the fuel price reference, she did not directly acknowledge that in August inflation rose to 5.2%.”
HOLD THE FRONT PAGE
WHAT’S ON TODAY
Online
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Former Greens leader Bob Brown, Griffith University’s Brendan Mackey, and The Australia Institute’s Polly Hemming will talk in a webinar about ending native forest logging.
Yuggera and Turrbal Country (also known as Brisbane)
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Author Trent Dalton will talk about his new book, Lola in the Mirror, at Avid Reader bookshop.
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Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk will give the 2023 State of the State address at the Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre,
Ngunnawal Country (also known as Canberra)
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Director of Jobs and Skills Australia Peter Dawkins will address the National Press Club.
